spemanig said:
Not true at all. The gameplay was NOT amazing. No one said that a good game can't have cutscenes. The Last of Us isn't a good game though. It's a good cutscene littered with boring and repetitive gameplay. Only a few GAMEPLAY moments in the Last of Us shine. The beginning when you play as Joel's daugher. The boss fight when you play as Ellie. The part where you play as Joel after he get's impaled. The part when you're hunting as Ellie. The deer scene. If that's ALL the game was, then it would deserve all of the hype. But that's a mere 10% of the overall gameplay. The rest is a stupid arcade-like Gears of War rip off that tries to scare you by limiting your ammo and offering only four enemy types the entire game over and over and over again until you've been completely desensitized from the "horrors" of both the infected and the humans. It stops being scary an hour in and even if the game isn't supposed to be scary, (I'm still convinced it's supposed to be an action adventure game... With zombies, because that's exactly how it plays) the gameplay juxtaposes so drastically with the overall tone of the story that it literally makes you want to get through the trudge through the boring gameplay just to get to the good cutscenes. And yeah, the multiplayer is pretty good. Not the best out there, but definitely better than the actual single player game, in fact. Why? It's better at being a game. The multiplayer is good because, big shocker coming, cover shooting as a game mechanic works well when the goal is to have fun in a strategic arcade-like multiplayer environment. It doesn't work when you are trying to tell a scary survival horror story about the preciously fleeting moments between a man and the child he is so lovingly trying to protect. Or at least, it didn't work with The Last of Us. If you want to be able to tell a good story through a video game, there has to be a merit to playing the game that watching a movie or reading a book couldn't give you. Games are interactive. That's their advantage. Games like The Walking Dead use choice and consequence effectively to tell a story that is gripping without litering the game with tedious and distracting gameplay that have nothing to do with the tone of the plot it's trying to uncover. Games like Resident Evil 4 use a clostrophobic camera, restrictive movement, strategic shot placement, and atmosphere to imerse the player in it's story. The fear that your main character feels is the fear that you feel. This is done through GAMEPLAY. JRPG's like Xenoblade: Chronicles perposefully contrast the story told in it's cutscenes from the actions done in gameplay. It tells it's story by "filling in gaps." It rewards already rewarding gameplay with cutscenes that move the plot forward. The cutscenes fill in gaps of time between gameplay while the gameplay similarly fills in gaps of time between cutscenes. This works in JRPGs because the point of them is usually to explore. In Xenoblade, you're on an adventure to explore a vast world in order to accomplish your goal. This is very easy to make entertaining in a video game, but when exploring would get tedious, you're given a break instead with a cutscene. Games like Bioshock and Metroid Prime tell their story strictly through gameplay. They reward exploration with plot. Every single one of those games are enjoyable without their cutscenes. Everyone of those games are still masterpeices without their cutscenes. They are all compelling because of their gameplay, NOT because of their cutscenes. The cutscenes are there to enhance the overall games. The Last of Us does none of that. The gameplay is there for something to do between the cutscenes. It's a movie first and a video game second. It's padding. That would be fine if it did something else instead, and in a few rare and fleeting moments it does, but decides to use boring level design, limited and repetitive not at all scary enemies, insultingly trivial "not-puzzles," and average arcade cover shooting to tell a story about the relationship between a father trying to protect his daughter. That doesn't make sense when typed out and it doesn't work when being played. The Last of Us is a technical marvel. It's definitely beautiful. It has an amazing soundtrack. It has a fantastic script and convincingly talented voice actors. The motion capture was great and the characters were likable. What I described is a fantastic CGI film. Having played it though, I wish I just watched it on Youtube. At least there I could've skipped the gameplay. It wouldn't be fair to call The Last of Us a bad game. There are games that are far worse that I'd consider average, but any game that make you not want play it doesn't deserve to be called a good game, because it's failed at what makes a game a game. |
